purple heart

plural purple hearts

1. The drug phenobarbitone when taken recreationally.
2. historicalslangA drinamyl tablet when taken recreationally, popular in the 1960s.

   And every penny she had / Was spent on purple hearts and cigarettes

   1972, Ray Davies, “Big Black Smoke”, performed by The Kinks

   2 more examples

   Detective Peter Goodall said the source of the tablets had not been traced. "Purple heart" or drinamyl tablets, were a stimulant drug and habit-forming.

   1963 March 27, “Drug pills eaten like sweets, says detective”, in The Guardian

   We were all coming down from taking purple hearts, the fashionable uppers of the period.

   2012, Pete Townshend, Who I Am, HarperCollins, →ISBN, page 245

plural Purple Hearts

1. USgovernmentA US military decoration awarded in the name of the President of the United States to those wounded or killed while serving on or after 5 April 1917.